151–160 of 233 posts
Did he really show a graph of increasing employment in women, decreasing in men, and then say "Let's ignore the women. Why on earth could male employment be going down?" Erm.... maybe because... women were taking their jobs?
I do not want to be employed. I want to do with my time what I want, and when I want. I do not want to continue living in the age of want, I want to live in the age of plenty. I think it's fair to assume this wish is pretty universal. So I do not give a rats arse about 'productivity', and neither does anybody else, what we want is to live in paradise, today. Paradise, for me, is when I can have all of the below as a…
1. Calories do grow on trees, but they have to be harvested, and the trees tended for. Whatever being that does the harvesting/tending (either bio or mecha) consumes calories on its own. What have you done for them to earn the right to have that many calories forked to you?
2. Even if water does fall from the sky, clouds are under no contractual obligation to deliver rain wherever you whish. Clean water is valuable because it must be harvested and transported from wherever it lays to wherever it's needed. What have you done for the being (bio or mecha) doing the harvesting/transporting to earn the right of expending time and effort in delivering that to you?
3. Alcohol comes, in principle, from the same calory pool of #1, but to transform it into beer it must be tranformed by some intelligent being under precise conditions. What have you done for him to earn the right for booze?
4. Sex on demand, oh my, this is my favorite one!!! What have you done to your potential partners so you earn the right to have sex with them regardless of their mood? Also, for any sufficiently sexy utopia to be realized, someone, somewhere must fuck the ugliest sometimes.
5. You'd probably die of hypothermia if you tried to settle a homestead in a National Park. What have you done for the potetial interstellar pioneers to have them carry your dead weight all over the solar system?
6. And this is because you failed the other five. Because after ages and ages of being a fucking poocher, you decided to kill yourself whenever you got bored??? What about giving back a little bit of the multiple gifts you received over your existence?
I don't think we will ever get the kind of AIs you dream about, but even if we did, I would not be surprised if they decided to terminate your sorry process for a lack of ROI.
Production just requires land and labor. Capital is output from previous production used as input again, and it is nice to have but not strictly necessary for employment of labor. Labor can be applied whenever labor has access to land. So the question is why can't people just go to work? Grow their own food to feed themselves, if need be? The Industrial Revolution put farmers out of work, but not because farming beca…
Funnily enough, my own (long term) project is aimed at addressing the problem you're pointing out. Given the possibility of remote work, there's no insurmountable reason why the only land worth living in should be concentrated in a few urban centers. https://sites.google.com/s/0BzzRwqIB2K0dSWhkTXBSTTltTDg/p/0B...
Even HN doesn't yet seem to be discussing the impact of coming VR/AR on people's geographic distribution.
Perhaps it's still too low profile? Eye tracking; facial expression tracking (researchy); foveated rendering reducing GPU requirements; inexpensive laptops with discrete GPUs; HMDs with monitor-like angular resolution; inexpensive finger tracking (hopefully)... perhaps it's easy to not notice these if you're not tracking the tech? Easy to think "remote work, so video conferencing, so limited impact - far better to do open plan offices"? Instead of "the practice and spatial constraints of software development will change dramatically over the next half decade".
Regarding the horse example, there US horse population is 9 million. The demand for horses never went away despite automation and has remained steady. If one tried to extrapolate the early 20th century horse population trend to the future, there should presently be no horses alive. Although the labor force participation rate is falling, the total labor force size has not (although it has flattened in recent years). R…
The only horses that stayed around were the ones that could perform a novelty (racing/entertainment) or low-demand-niche role (short trips on rugged terrain).
[1] A really, really underappreciated and overdismissed analogy.
Great article that seems to leave the question unresolved. If technological unemployment is not a large factor; but inequality within advanced economies is rising, then what other factors are at play? Are the changes necessary to deal with those causes the same changes that would be needed to deal with an all-knowing AI in 2150?
inequality is rising because some people are simply more skilled than others.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Now humans can start focusing on spending their day building things for the entertainment of other humans, and also choosing careers based on what they feel is fun/satisfying for themselves. In this sphere, there are winners and losers, and the amount of losers is vastly understated and the amount of winners is vastly overblown. Take youtube, for example. Most are not clearing more than a few hundreds per month but…
So what? If you have a place to live and food, then satisfaction is next on the list. Is the youtube life not satisfying?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Thing about land is they aren't making it anymore. SpaceX is going to change it.
If things worked out according to the rosiest predictions, that would raise what classical economists called the "margin of production" and would thus raise wages for as long as there is freely available land of sufficient quality. Although, you'd be surprised how quickly a commons can be enclosed. Yet, given the harshness and distances in space, and the fact that land generally obtains value by proximity to other st…
originally i did mean space, yet even the cheap globally available internet the Musk plans to build using SpaceX would noticeably increase availability of "connected" (an important aspect of "proximity") land.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Thing about land is they aren't making it anymore. SpaceX is going to change it.
If things worked out according to the rosiest predictions, that would raise what classical economists called the "margin of production" and would thus raise wages for as long as there is freely available land of sufficient quality. Although, you'd be surprised how quickly a commons can be enclosed. Yet, given the harshness and distances in space, and the fact that land generally obtains value by proximity to other st…
For any reasonable near-term (centuries scale) prospect, there are no serious space or material constraints to outer space. Quality is a different subject, I want to get into that.
> Yet, given the harshness and distances in space, and the fact that land generally obtains value by proximity to other stores of human-produced value
Density of development is fundamentally different in microgravity. Our cities are all 2-dimensional. We can create a space station that hosts a "metro" area of stupendous population where everyone is in fairly quite commuting time of each other.
Of course, we have to return to the "quality" aspect. More work is required up-front to get this sort of thing working. On Earth, we already have many resources that we take for granted for which we would have to devote effort to producing in space. Consider, Oxygen, fresh water, soil, etc.
But couldn't the same thing have been said about virtually every component that went into creating the industrial revolution in the first place? The production of one thing requires support of another industrial product. Enormous production chains are created. Coal products are used in blast furnaces to make steel. Steel is used to make rail tracks to transport coal. Coal is burned to power steam engines to remove water from coal mines. Steal is used to produce those steam engines. Before long, steam engines are used to move coal over the tracks. All of this network goes to create manufactured goods, which make farming more efficient to support more people. In a superficial sense it would kind of sound easier to stay at prior population levels and live with the less efficient farming that didn't have this wild, confusing, and unsustainable web of dependencies.
Why haven't we made progress toward a space-based industrial network of production? You can hardly say we've tried. Through the Shuttle era, launch economics hardly budged. Space programs were turned into science & jobs programs. Manned exploration beyond Earth orbit stopped, and all robotic (indirect) interaction with the rest of material in our solar system ground to a crawl. A major rover like Curiosity takes years to drive as far as the manned lunar rover did in a day, at a tremendous time and resource cost.
Actual exploitation of space resources has so little actually invested in it. The main value we derive from space now is a perch from which to spy on and locate the citizens of Earth. Spending on space is not, at all, focused on something you can "development". Nor has it been. The one time we passed an international law on space resources (the Outer Space Treaty), we came up with incoherent and inaction-able drivel that undeveloped (and presently useless) resources were the property of everyone, and that only governments are really use them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funnily enough, my own (long term) project is aimed at addressing the problem you're pointing out. Given the possibility of remote work, there's no insurmountable reason why the only land worth living in should be concentrated in a few urban centers. https://sites.google.com/s/0BzzRwqIB2K0dSWhkTXBSTTltTDg/p/0B...
> Given the possibility of remote work, [...] urban centers. Even HN doesn't yet seem to be discussing the impact of coming VR/AR on people's geographic distribution. Perhaps it's still too low profile? Eye tracking; facial expression tracking (researchy); foveated rendering reducing GPU requirements; inexpensive laptops with discrete GPUs; HMDs with monitor-like angular resolution; inexpensive finger tracking (hopef…
The idea that rising disability is a cause of declining labor force participation is interesting, and fits in with anecdotal data from what family members in medicine have told me. They basically phrase it as: If you're uneducated and poor, why would you work a low paying job with little hope of advancement when you could go on disability and collect a similar amount of money without working?
We don't appreciate how difficult it can be to employ these marginally capable workers. Keeping these people on staff at a small company raises health and operational insurance costs pretty dramatically, so it can be hard to justify keeping them on staff, even if you wanted to.
Disability is also pretty difficult to get, despite how the news makes it out to be easy. My father had multiple heart attacks and cancer, and he's still fighting to get on disability. And when he does, it will take years to come into full-effect.